


Alien Days

by scorpiolocks1



Category: Invader Zim, Lilo & Stitch (2002)
Genre: Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, No Relationship, but not like willingly, i am fueled by reviews plz help me, ok, uh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-10-20
Packaged: 2018-05-19 16:16:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5973808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiolocks1/pseuds/scorpiolocks1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dib and Lilo are both children who deserve better than to be waking up in strange places with memory-fragmenting drugs in their system and adults who withhold answers. Dib and Lilo are both children who are pretty stubborn when it comes to being told they should forget about the existence of their respective alien acquaintances. Dib and Lilo are both children; and they are in way over their heads.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cognizance

**Author's Note:**

> Helloooo archiveofourown! It's been a long time that I've been meaning to post a story here. Actually it's been a long time I've been meaning to post anything...anwhere. Ahem.  
> I started this story a long time ago, but only recently have I rediscovered it and also my undying love for these two fandoms and their seemless interaction (in my mind anyway). I freely admit to having been somewhat inspired by hideousblob's Experimental series, but eh, I doubt this will live up to that. I am as always fueled entirely by reviews, so if there's anyone left of these dying fandoms who wants to see them in a more serious situation; please oh please give me feedback. I thank you tremendously.

"One foot leads to another  
Night's for sleep, blue curtains, covers  
Sequins in the eyes  
That's a fine time to dine  
Divine who's circling, feeding the cards to the midwives  
Who love those alien days" - Alien Days by MGMT

Lilo awoke to darkness.  
Her head spun, skull feeling as though it were fused to whatever hard metal surface was below her. Her hands clenched and unclenched, she felt sweat on her palms.  
Her vision cleared, darkness slowly gave way into a sickly, dull white light.  
Her mind tried to connect the dots, grasped desperately to recall the why and how of her situation, coming up empty every time.  
She took a deep breath and refused to panic.  
Every muscle seemed to hurt, a with a threateningly numb sort of pain, as she pushed herself into a sitting position. The floor she was on was dark gray, and cold, in stark contrast with the vivid white of the walls. Her head responded to the change in altitude with an increased throbbing, and the world pulsed with her aching brain as she took in her surroundings. She was in a large rectangular room, or cell; with three white walls, and two doors...no, it was two rooms; she reached out her hand and found thick clear glass. The space was divided between two thin cells, separated by this clear barrier. And across from her, sitting cross-legged in a nondescript white chair, was an unfamiliar woman.  
She was tall, thin, with dusty brown hair pulled into a bun, and a smile, like a doctor who tries to be soothing as they put a shot in your arm.  
“Hello Lilo.” She said. Even from the other side of the glass she could hear her perfectly. Her voice was like buttermilk.  
Lilo's grip on the table gaveway, and she melted back into her former position, eyes locked on the woman, unable to form words, and hardly able to blink.  
“Relax,” She said, and Lilo noticed that her smile didn't waver as she talked, like it was the natural position of her lips. “I've just given you something to wake you up. It's a small dosage, though. Your limbs will feel heavy and you won't want to move; that's normal. Just lay back and take it easy.”  
There wasn't much choice in the matter. The minute her head connected with table her eyes seemed to want to force themselves shut, the ceiling glared down at her with malicious brightness, and she began to sludge back to wherever she had come from willingly.  
Stitch.  
The name and the accompanying thoughts steadied her, her eyes snapped back open in time to see the strange woman from the other side of the room lay a hypodermic needle on a small white table. Everything was white here, she noted sluggishly. From the walls to the woman's coat and shoes to the table she was on. The only contrast was her own hair, jet black and spread out around her, focusing and unfocusing in her blurry vision. It was down, and slightly tangled and there was still a little sand...  
Sand. Stitch. The Beach.  
They flashed into her mind again, slowly gripping her beneath the weight of whatever sedative she was under. There were sensations in her memory; she felt as if they were right there, recent and accessible, but receding whenever she came close to them.  
“S..Stitch...” she managed. The woman's head turned, her smile still pasted on and her eyebrows raised expectantly. “W...where is...Stitch...?” She found she had to breath out her words in order to make them at all.  
The woman's smile increased ever-so-slightly, and she was hit by a wave of exhaustion. “I don't know who that is, dear.”  
“M...my...dog...”  
Something flickered across the woman's face, something hardly perceivable, and she was almost sure it was amusement. “Probably at home.”  
Yes, that made sense. Sometimes he stayed home to wait on her, when he was busy, or sometimes when they'd been arguing...  
No.  
She could remember him being there with her, on the beach, so that had to be false. Everything seemed to move in slow motion within her mind, every thought seemed to concrete itself just as it was undermined by another one.  
The woman was speaking again. “Now, can I ask you a question?”  
Lilo couldn't have objected if she wanted to, and she wasn't really sure she did, so instead she said nothing, laying in an uncomfortable position, body twisted halfway onto her side, head resting on her arm.  
“Do you remember how you got here?”  
She tried to shake her head, and found that her neck had not yet remembered how to move. On the lighter side of things, her knee felt cold against the table. It occurred to her with a start that she was still in her hula skirt and top.  
“No.” She choked, trying twice before the word actually came out.  
“I see. Are you in any pain?”  
Was she? It was impossible to tell what she was feeling. Up until now she couldn't have honestly answered whether she were clothed or not.  
“I...n..no.” She replied, cause' it was easiest.  
“All right Lilo, I know you're confused and very tired. I'm going to go and get some bloodwork done, and then you'll need one more shot, and I can send you home, OK?”  
Home. Yes, I want to go home.  
She nodded, proud of herself with the accomplishment. The woman smiled again, her lips making a thin line in her face, and then rose to leave. The back of her stark white lab coat met Lilo's eyes , blurring her vision with the fast movement, and suddenly she was chilled all the way through.  
“N...no...” She managed, struggling to raise her voice and nearly succeeding. The woman turned, a question on her face. “My...d...dog...with me...on the...beach.” She sounded slurred, like someone intoxicated. A second wave of what she now knew to be panic gripped her, forcing her mind into more consciousness as she wondered what was making her feel this way.  
The woman seemed to be thinking for a short moment, her smile still there, but now waning a bit. “Oh,” She said finally, her voice unnaturally calm. “You must mean Experiment 626.”  
Lilo sucked in a breath, and forced herself to nod again. “Wh...ere....ok?”  
“Yes, he's perfectly fine. We're going to keep him for awhile though, and get to know him a little better.” She came a step closer, her voice lowering just the slightest decimal. “You won't remember this conversation when you get home; but I'm telling you this anyway so that when you do remember, you'll know not to worry.” And she smiled down at Lilo's prone form, again, only this time Lilo couldn't tell if it was sadism or pity on her face.  
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * *  
Dib awoke to pure pain.  
It was in his spine and his legs, coursing through his arms and down his fingers until it met to spin, throbbing, in his aching head.  
He groaned, his ears seeming to pop themselves into place in time to catch the sound. And his eyes ripped themselves open, only to meet a blurry world of white and gray nothingness.  
He closed them again.  
“Are you awake?” The voice came from somewhere to his left, but it sounded muffled, like someone talking through water.  
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out and he wasn't sure what to say to a dumb question like that anyway, so he closed it again.  
“Are you in pain?”  
This time he managed to say something, to the effect of. “Ow.”  
There was no reply to this, and after a minute he started to wonder if the speaker had left. His head swam, his memory blurring in and out like his hearing. He struggled into a sitting position and opened his eyes, hands searching feverishly around the surface he was on for his glasses.  
“Don't try to move, Dib. It's important right now that you rest. You're under a heavy sedative.”  
The voice was a man's. He chose to ignore it for the moment, and continued his search. His hand connected with the edge of a table-like surface, and it occurred to him that the surface he was was not the floor. Finally he located the familiar feel of glass and metal, on the edge near where his head would have been a moment ago.  
The world cleared, though it didn't stop it's spinning, lilting movement, fuzzing in and out around the edges. His head reeled, nausea washing over him like a breath of wind. He felt to the table to steady himself, swinging his legs over the to touch the floor and clutching his stomach.  
“How do you have that much energy? Was your father developing an immunity to sedation in you?”  
Dib decided he was definitely going to throw up, so yet another stupid question would have to go unanswered. He dry-heaved onto the floor a couple times, until his ears split with the pressure in his head, and a pen clicked somewhere behind him, jotting notes onto a clip board.  
“How is your hearing?” Asked the voice.  
“Where the heck am I?!” Dib demanded, voice cracking with the raw taste of stomach acid in his throat. “And where's...Zim?”  
Not that I care.  
But it was one of the last things he remembered, before consciousness became a blur of pain and nausea. Zim's frightened screeching as the roar of a (helicopter maybe?) split the air above them, knocking them both to the ground in an instant, as strong-gloved hands grasped the shoulders and the feeling of needles being jammed into his arms bled into unconscious dreams.  
“Zim? Who is 'Zim'?”  
The man's tone was almost, but not quite, comically innocent. Dib wiped his mouth with his coat sleeve, realizing he felt increasingly hot and wondering if he were feverish.  
“OK.” He said, his tone dry. It really meant “you're obviously being useless, so just go away.”, but the man seemed to take it as incentive to ask more questions.  
“How long have you known about the extraterrestrial entity?”  
“Like, for the the last two years.” He hadn't ever really bothered to keep track.  
Wait.  
“The, 'extraterrestrial entity?' Yeah, that's Zim. Where is he?”  
He finally turned to meet the man, finding nothing exciting, a bland brown-haired face under a stark white lab coat.  
“I see.” He mouthed, and smiled. Dib realized he had probably been smiling this whole time. He decided he didn't like this man. “He's being held in a room similar to this. His reaction to the sedative was different than yours, of course.”  
“What does that mean?”  
There was no answer to this, just a lame smile that looked confused but said essentially, 'none of your business.'  
“Why did you bring us here?”  
The man cleared his throat uncomfortably, sweeping his eyes around the room as if looking to someone who wasn't there for the scripted answer. But it was only a momentary lapse of moral; he brought his eyes back to Dib and said levelly,  
“You were never meant to come here, that was accident. We'll be sending you home as soon as we get the right medications to counter the sedative.” A slight pause. “It should be obvious why we took...Zim.”  
A tinge of something...anger or panic or something similar...rose in Dib, he shoved it away irritably.  
“So...are you the government?”  
The smile again. “Let's just say, we're a concerned third party. You did well Dib, tracking him the way you did, and exposing him as best you could. He's very dangerous, left unchecked, and fighting him alone was not a responsibility that should have been handled by someone your age.” Amen to that. “But it's under control, so I don't want you to worry anymore. Get some rest.”  
He rose. It was an obvious dismissal, and the idea of rest did seem achingly tempting, looming in the back of his brain.  
“I'm going to give you this to help the nausea, OK?” The coat turned back again, catching Dib as he nearly nodded off. Which was probably good, because he was still perched on the edge of the table, and the next step would likely have been the floor.  
He held a glass of water and a small, pink pill, seemingly produced from nowhere. Dib wasn't really nauseous anymore, but he wasn't a total idiot either. A small button was pressed, and some invisible barrier was raised, and he handed him the pill and the water at arm's length, then waited expectantly for him to take them.  
Dib did, or at least, he put the pill in his mouth and simulated swallowing.  
There was silence for a moment, the man didn't stop staring at him and it took Dib all of ten seconds to catch on.  
Slowly, he let his eyes fall shut, and sunk back down onto the table in an uncomfortable position. That of a person faking heavy sedation, or so he hoped.  
In any case it seemed to satisfy the man. He cocked his head to the side like a dog, seemingly surveying Dib for authenticity. Dib felt his glasses pressed into the side of his head, and the bitter taste of the pill against the bottom of his mouth, and the aching throb of his pulse changing position. Finally, satisfied, he heard the click of the man's boots as he left the room, and the strange almost in-detectible sound of the barrier going down again.  
He was alone.  
The first thing he did was spit the pill back out, and all the remnants of it. And then hold his aching head. And then slide himself down from the table and carefully, carefully hold his hand out to the invisible barrier. Praise God it wasn't a force field that would shock him into oblivion, and then hold his aching head again.  
It appeared to be glass, but that didn't seem right. Dib plunked it with his finger, and it made a very glass-like noise, thin, hardly the thickness of his thumb. It occurred to him that these were really cruddy security measures for the government, or even someone masquerading as the government, and then, in nearly the same instant, that the floor beneath his boots was wet. He turned in a circle, observing the line of the ceiling where it was swathed in a filmy gray plastic. There was a dampness here that he hadn’t noticed before, but which seemed familiar.  
There was a sound, somewhere down the hallway. Dib froze, debating whether or not to bother trying to fake his past position on the table. He didn't have time to make a decision; the footsteps receded down the hallway without ever passing his room. Dib decided he'd had enough of this place.  
With a hand on the table, he jumped feet first into the glass, and it shattered with a satisfying force, scraping tiny pieces against the floor and into the hallway. He crunched across it, nearly slipping, and almost instantly heard a yell, and heavy feet running down the hall. In a second he had stumbled across the room and grasped the hypodermic needle off the table, slinking back against the wall just as the man from earlier came barreling in, slipping on the glass as Dib had. He whirled, hand whipping...a gun...towards Dib, who was lucky enough to have dropped to the floor on time. Without thinking he brought the syringe upwards, and it connected with the man's leg. He let out a sharp cry, and fell backwards, sprawled on the ground, for a second he grasped at his leg where the needle had gone in, and then he seemed to go limp.  
Dib scrambled upright, heart pounding a rhythm in his chest and through his ears, and clouding around the edge of his vision. The man just lay there, his eyes closed...that was a good sign, right? No, maybe it wasn't. He moved closer, hands starting to shake with the adrenaline, and another wave of nausea sweeping over him. Cautiously he reached and out and checked the man's pulse, mentally counting the seconds as it seemed nothing...no, there was pulse. A weak, but steady pulse. Well, he was unconscious, but not dead. Thank God, thank god. Dib Membrane had killed no people today.  
But he was in the presence of people who obviously wouldn't hesitate to kill him.  
His breathing had become shallow, and he noticed the gun lying by his foot, a cold black pistol that looked like a movie prop up close. He took it, it was heavy, and...loaded, he realized. Carefully, he set it back down. Mentally knowing he was making a stupid decision and that it could save his life, his gut instinct won out, and instead he forced himself to his feet, grabbed the syringe, and took off down the hallway.


	2. Flux

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dib and Zim and Lilo and Stitch run into each other, only not in that order. Also this place has really cruddy security, dontcha think?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got two kudos on the last chapter and though I'm not familiar with this site (like, at all) I'm taking that as a good sign and posting the next chapter. I finally have a solid outline but it's still slow going and as always I really appreciate reviews. Haven't proof read this chapter yet but I'll probably be doing that within in the next couple of days, so you if you catch anything feel free to let me know. And as always, thanks for reading!

"Up above, aliens hover  
Making home movies for the folks back home  
Of all these weird creatures who lock up their spirits  
Drill holes in themselves and live for their secrets"

\- Subterranean Homesick Alien by Radiohead

Lilo opened her eyes again.   
Time was a blur, she remembered nothing after resting them, but time must have passed, because that woman was gone...  
No, that wasn't right. She remembered seeing the woman leave.   
Her nausea was mostly gone, an empty feeling now in the pit of her stomach. In its place, a crushing tiredness had set into her every limb, as if the weight that had been on them before was increased double-fold.   
But her memory was back.   
She remembered the beach, the sand that was still beneath her toes now, washed and unwashed by the rising tide, and Stitch beside her...on two legs, because he was stubborn that way and the beach was abandoned. They had been talking...something about Pleakly and whether banana and cocoanut would work together in a cake. Nothing she had been paying much attention to, because her mind was elsewhere, on the golden-burnished sunset and the day's hula lessons and her art canvas left unfinished in the school room.  
She could trace every train of thought, right up to the second something roared out of the air above them, coming abruptly into view over the hill, spewing sand in all directions and knocking her to the ground. She had come up coughing, her stinging eyes catching sight of Stitch as he skidded defensively in front of her, and then the figures appeared; like army men, clothed from head-to-foot in black and wielding guns. Guns they trained on them and in a quarter of a second Stitch, not her, was the center of fire.   
Which wouldn't be a problem for someone who was bulletproof, but these were...some kind of darts. She remembered clearly watching the red-orange tails of them, as twenty or so thudded into the ground not far from her curled up form.  
She didn't remember what had happened next. One must have hit her, something full of tranquilizer meant to take down Stitch- and if that was true she was lucky to be alive.   
Her groggy memory was evidenced by the sand. It was between her toes and in her hair and underneath her fingernails, where she had no-doubt clawed the sand to catch a grip, trying to make her way towards Stitch, a blurry figure only a yard away.   
“We're going to keep him for awhile...  
The woman in the lab coat. Things connected, falling into place, and she felt the table below her, cold and metal, as if for the first time.   
Like heck you are.  
Wrenching herself upright was no easy task, her muscles felt like jelly, undeveloped skin on her fragile aching bones.   
So this is what it's like to be a hundred.  
The glass barrier to the other end of the room was either not there, or literally invisible. She reached her hand out weakly and swiped air, missing until she connected with something surprisingly sharp instead. It was the edge of the barrier, and the midst of it a door, or at least a small hole. She was on the floor now, crouched with her arms hugging her knees, and barely able to keep that position. The hole she felt was a small square cut in the glass, its purpose as in-determinable as the rest of the room. It was roughly the size of a dog door. Big enough, she realized, to fit through.   
An almost impossible task, at the moment.   
Her breathing was shallow, though, she found, regulating itself. Whatever they had given her, whatever she had been shot with, was wearing off. Sluggishly she pulled herself through the door, crawling foot over foot through the opening until gravity did the rest, and she landed, a sad bundle of hair and hula skirt, on the other side.   
The table above her was a flimsy thing, metal legs and thin aluminum. It toppled as she fumbled with its legs, crashing to the floor beside her and spewing vials and needles across the empty white space.   
“I've given you something to wake you up.”  
Something in a needle. Something she obviously needed more of, as her limbs still felt as though they were melting into floor.   
She blundered through the various needles, scattering them along the floor. If this place had video surveillance, she pondered tiredly, they weren't very attentive.   
Or their focus is on Stitch.   
The thought motivated her, as she found what looked like a half-empty syringe of something clear-ish and thin, its needle still sporting a plastic bacterial cover. Sucking in a deep breath Lilo shut her eyes and plunged it into her arm just below the elbow, gasping sharply at the pain. Her thumb squeezed down just the tiniest bit, enough to inject just a little of the substance; and then in one jerky movement she drew it out and tossed it across the room. Then she backed herself against a wall, and waited, measuring her breathing, watching for any sign that she’d just poisoned herself.   
A minute passed; or maybe an hour. It was hard to tell time here, and all Lilo had to go on was her own slow and steady breaths. There was no perceivable human sound in the building, ship, wherever she was. Just a very low, mechanical humming noise that was easy to mistake for her own head ringing.   
Whatever was in the vial was working, she realized, as her breaths came faster, and she found herself subconsciously rubbing the tender red spot where the needle had gone in. Still unsteady, she pulled herself to both feet and adjusted her crooked hula skirt. It was cold here, she realized, once not under the effects of the drugs. Or maybe the drugs were making her cold?   
There was a stale musty scent to the air, as she wandered down the hallways in the direction her gut told her the woman in the lab coat had gone. Here the mechanical sound was louder, but it didn’t help, only seeming to emphasize how small she felt trying to distinguish her own quiet footfalls padding down the corridor. She was freezing, she realized, once the effects of the drugs seemed to have mostly worn off. The bitter chill scared her, the thought entering her head that if it was this cold, she couldn’t be on Kauai anymore, that she was miles and miles away from home, and Nani, and what if Stitch was somewhere else entirely?   
But for sanity’s sake she shoved them stubbornly away, and continued resolutely down the hall, arms wrapped tightly around herself.   
Just before she rounded the third corridor turn (or maybe it was the fourth, it had been awhile before Lilo thought to count), she heard a voice.   
It was a man’s voice, talking low and yet still splitting the monotony of the corridor so much starkly that Lilo stopped in her tracks, flattening herself against the nearest wall, heart pounding in her ears.   
“No, I haven’t heard from him. I’m headed down that way now to check on it, but first…” There was a pause, Lilo heard a booted foot scrape against the floor, and she tensed to run the opposite way, skin chill from the cold concrete wall.   
“What?!” She jumped at the sharp sound of the man’s voice, and steadied herself against the floor in a runner’s crouch. “How is that possible?! I thought you said we had the facilities…”   
He was interrupted, and with her nerves on edge Lilo could hear the frenzied voice on the other end of the device, but not what they were saying.   
“That’s…no, I’m not going after it. You’re crazy. You were crazy to ever bring that thing here.”  
More frenzied yelling from the other side of the line. Finally, a sigh.   
“Yeah, all right. That one I’ll check on. But I’m telling you if that thing gets anywhere near S wing, I’m gone.”   
She heard the man’s boots hit the floor and backed up reflexively before realizing they were heading away from her, receding down the corridor.   
Lilo sat in the quiet for a while, still crouched against the wall, weighing her options.   
If they were talking about Stitch, there was a good chance her extraterrestrial sibling was loose, or at least, causing trouble for their captors. Then again, who knew how many captives this facility had, and how dangerous any one of them were.  
She now knew that she was either in or near a portion of the building known as “S” wing, but that didn’t really help her one way or another. The corridor she was in now was a branching pathway without openings, but she had passed up plenty of opportunities to go back into the heart of the building…  
Chewing her lip for a moment, Lilo took one backwards look down the corridor before setting out after the man. 

******************************************************************************   
Dib was starving.   
He realized this as soon as his heart stopped pounding in his ears, and then a second later his stomach decided which way up was again. It hit him like a bullet train; an empty, weak feeling that left him clutching his middle as he stumbled down the empty corridors.  
The last thing he remembered eating was…toast, this morning. Overdone, and a handful of freeze-dried cherries he had pilfered from the cupboard before running to catch Gaz as she sped out the door. He could remember recess, too…but the recollection of the day slowly became vague, distorted by what could only have been dreams he had while unconscious. He remembered the smell of hot dogs, his least favorite lunch food, and finding Gaz in her usual spot with her back to the window. He remembered eyeing Zim on his way to the table, and smirking at the image of his enemy warily regarding the cylinder of meat on his plate. He remembered the bell ringing, and Torque shoving him into a desk on his way out of the classroom (his side still hurt a little, actually) and he remembered shouldering his backpack and trudging through the new mud behind Gaz.  
He remembered Zim, confronting him on the steps outside of school about…something. Some device he was sure Dib had a hand in stealing, something he had probably just misplaced. But Dib, instead of brushing him off, had argued and antagonized him half the way home, allowing Gaz to get fed up and go on ahead, and this was where it got fuzzy. They were somewhere in between the street facing the grease-coated back of McMeaties, and the open field which stretched on into dead long grass before the train tracks, when the sound of helicopters whirred in, and something- a sudden blast of wind and sound, knocked them both to the ground. He remembered Zim’s claws digging into his upper arm at the last minute before everything went dark.  
The marks were still there, actually. Dib rubbed the three-odd angry red abrasions, a reminder that he wasn’t entirely on his own here.  
What a thought. It wasn’t like Zim would be any help…if he was even conscious, or at this point, alive. Dib swallowed down a last wave of cold nausea, and sped up down the corridor towards what seemed to be a lighter area, boots skidding to a stop as the sound of hushed voices reached his ears.  
Dib was in a connecting room, he realized, with three or four doorways going off in separate directions. The voices were coming from the leftmost door, but he couldn’t tell if they were approaching or receding.  
“I think Maxwell’s squad was down this way when it got out.” Said one. The tone was hushed, conspiratorial almost. “But I haven’t heard anything on the walkie for at least thirty. Which way did you come from?”  
A deeper voice responded. “Little past F. I took my time getting down here, but…” There was a pause, and the sound of shoes scuffling as a muffled voice from the other end of what Dib could only assume was the walkie-talkie fuzzed to life.  
“All units report to D wing, section 5 immediately for assistance with containment breach. Repeat: all units to D wing, section 5 on the double.” The panicked-sounding voice seemed to ring and echo in the quiet of the hallway, and Dib backed further into the shadows, shrinking back in case the two voices decided to rush out this way in response.  
After the silence returned though, it became clear that they had no intentions of doing any such thing. One of the men muttered what sounded like a curse under his breath, presumably shoving the talkie back into its place.  
“That’s right up this way.” Said the deeper voice, and the other one repeated the curse with more fervor.  
There was another second of heavy silence where Dib listened intently for the sound of any movement, and heard only breathing.  
“I’m not going.” Mumbled the first voice, finally. “I don’t get paid enough to get ripped apart by that alien…thing. I’m heading back to S wing and I’ll say I had an urgent assignment. I don’t really care, if they find out. I mean, what can they do? I don’t have any….” He trailed off, and Dib realized they were retreating, to the left. He waited until he could no longer hear their booted feet on the floor before resolutely starting off in the opposite direction.  
Zim had escaped. It was the only thing he could definitely garner from their conversation, and it was a stroke of luck that he’d heard it at all. Of course, if he’d had the time he could have considered why he was going after Zim when that meant that half the guards in the facility would be out that way. At least the Irken seemed to have the element of fear on them, odd as it was for the tiny being. Maybe they hadn’t accounted for his PAK legs? Dib decided not to think about it, shoving cold hands in his coat pocket and marching down the hall without hesitation. At least he wasn’t going to have to drag a dead alien out of…wherever they were. That would just be gross, and generally the thought gave him an unpleasant feeling in the pit of stomach. Or that could be the drugs, who knew.   
He was deep in an amusing scenario wherein Gaz had accidently saved them both and overthrew the entire organization in order to get Dib to buy her takeout for dinner, when a sudden rush of noise sent him scurrying backwards for cover down a darkened side-hallway. Booted feet ran past, accompanied by a frantic voice over a walkie. They passed way too quick to notice Dib, and way too fast get much more information than a few quick words from the other end of the line.   
He caught. “Alien.” “Walls” and “Fire at will.”  
When they were gone he started cautiously out after them, and with a lot less confidence in his steps. He knew it was Zim that had escaped, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t faced Zim before; a murderously determined Zim, no less, and this would be a scared disoriented one. Still, the fact that grown soldiers were finally treating the alien like a threat (which he was!) made the situation seem more real than any of the other times he’d faced the Irken. There was a lot of noise coming from the hallway ahead of him now, but it all seemed far enough away to not be a threat, and receding all the time. The sound of a gunshot made him jump, once, but then harsh yelling seemed to answer it, and he assumed someone was getting chewed out for firing a gun in such a narrow room.   
It was only when the pathways started splitting up and he found himself in a much darker, wetter part of the building that Dib suddenly had an epiphany. It started when he heard something scuttling. His first thought was was Zim’s PAK legs, which was a mixed blessing because on the one hand, that meant he’d found Zim, but on the other, Dib hated those legs. But as it approached, he realized that a) the sound wasn’t a metal one; it was more scrabbling, and there wasn’t the robotic moving sound. b) It was close and he still didn’t hear angry muttering or see the looming shape of an insectoid Irken silhouetted in the hallway. And c) which he realized when the scuttling sound came to sudden halt; it was coming from above him, and as far as he knew Zim had yet to gain the ability to defy gravity with those legs.   
Dib looked up into alien eyes of pure pupil-less black before the world went dark. 

************************************************************

Lilo felt her heart sink as soon as she entered the holding room.   
Her eyes had automatically flown to the upper portion of the room, similar to the one she had been in when she first awoke; looking for a flash of blue fur, shining black eyes, maybe even bared teeth. But instead she found a thin glass wall identical to the one she had been contained behind, the kind that even a complete idiot would have known better than to put Stitch behind; and on the other side slumped unconscious against the wall was an alien she had never seen before. He was roughly her size, and humanoid, with green skin and where there ought to be hair two long black antennae stood straight out, curving sharply at the end. He was dressed in some kind of uniform, all pink stripes and black gloves.   
Lilo pounded on the glass, at first like one would knock on a door, and then when that didn’t warrant a response, with both fists like she was trying to break it. It took a full second for the alien to rouse itself, first the antennae seemed to perk; and then its small shoulders shifted, and it took a shaky move to stand. One hand propped against the glass, and one held it’s forehead as it groggily blinked iridescent pink eyes around the room.   
Lilo took a deep breath. “Listen you don’t know me but I know about aliens and I don’t know where we are or why they’ve taken us here but it’s probably not good and they have my dog Stitch and I can help you get out and we can help each other escape but we have to go now!”  
She was quite suddenly out of breath. The alien looked at her and blinked two very bright pink eyes slowly.   
“Whuh?” He said. His voice sounded gravely, like someone with the flu who’d just woken up from a long sleep.   
Lilo released a breath, and smiled in a way she hoped was disarming. “Uh, sorry. I should have started from the beginning. Can you understand me?”  
The alien blinked a couple more times, and seemed to bring her face into focus. It stiffened, small form straightening. “Yeah, yes! Of course I can.” It said, and then. “Who are you? And…where am I?”  
“I don’t know.” Lilo said patiently. “I’m just…”  
“Silence!” Shouted the alien. It seemed to try to straighten itself but bowled over, clutching its middle and supporting itself with the other hand. “You will release me at once!” He gritted, but it had a lot less venom to it.   
Lilo took the opportunity to finish. “I was taken here just like you.”   
“Hmph. Then why are you on that side of the glass?” Muttered the alien. He was rubbing his temple and looked like he might be sick.   
“I escaped.” Lilo continued. And then, “Are you OK?”  
“Yes! Of course! I’m fine.” A pause, he seemed to shake himself and stood up straight again, but Lilo could see his hands trembling. He had only three fingers on each hand, and even under the thick gloves they looked sharp like claws.   
“Now, human, enough of this banter! You will release Zim!”   
He punctuated this statement with an authoritative footstomp. Lilo would have been amused if he wasn’t so loud, but she had a feeling that asking him to be quieter would have the opposite effect.   
“Uhm, sure, I’ll try, but I already told you I’m not the one who brought you here.”  
“Lies! Now open the cell.”   
“Sheesh! All right, let me try and figure out where the door is.”   
She was already feeling around the glass exterior of the panel starting from the bottom up. The alien- Zim or whatever, was watching her distrustfully the whole time. She had an awful feeling he was either going to attack her, or try to make a run for it whenever she got the cell open, but right now he was her only shot, and reasoning with him didn’t seem to be getting her anywhere.  
“Well?!” He exasperated after a minute.   
“This one doesn’t have a little door like mine did.” Explained Lilo, “and I can’t find a button or a switch anywhere. And hey, listen don’t get touchy with m…”  
She trailed off, snapping her attention to the door a half second after Zim did the same, antennae perking that way in alert.   
The sound of a walkie fizzing out reached them from far off down the hall, and in the straining silence that followed heavy bootsteps.


	3. Crepiscule

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dib expects everything to go horribly and Zim and Lilo go through some trust exercises together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK first off: sorry sorry sorry for such a long delay! I have college finals, a new job, and just general life craziness checked on my masterlist of excuses, but I'm sure no one wants to hear about that. I also was pleasantly forced into watching Gravity Falls finally, and it totally consumed my life, so expect a fic of that once this one gets completed (which it will be!). Thank you to all the amazing reviewers and kudo-givers who brought me oodles of joy in my busy workweeks and are just generally amazing. Sorry for the over-all not great-ness of this chapter, but I'm trying to work some things out about this story before I get to the juicy bits.

"Is there anybody out there? I've come too far to go,  
Is there anybody here? never been so far from home,  
Is there anybody out there? another few miles to go,  
Is there anybody here? man, it'd just be nice to know." - "Spacewalk" by JOYWAVE

Dib felt himself being knocked bodily to the ground, which he had anticipated; in the next instant, he had intended to flip around and struggle up onto two feet in order to run. This strategy had worked fairly well in the past when being bodyslammed that one summer he had been forced to play football. However, in those instances, he was as a general rule quicker and smarter than his opponent; and this time however, this was not the case. Before the necessary brain cells had been coerced into sending the signal to run, he was bodily hoisted upright by something that had a hold on the back of his jacket, and slammed into the nearest wall hard enough that the impact jarred the glasses right off of his head.  
They went skidding across the floor in front of him, and Dib came face to face with something blurry and black that seemed to have a lot of teeth. It snarled at him, and Dib did the only reasonable thing; he screamed.  
As soon as he screamed the thing jammed a kind of hand (paw?) over his mouth, and in the next second he tasted thick fur. He was so busy spitting it out and being disgusted and terrified at the same time that he didn’t realize for a second he’d been released, sinking to the floor in a sitting position. He was furiously wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket and wondering if running was going to get him slammed again when the thing approached out of his peripheral vision, grabbed a sleeve before he could cower away, and shoved something into his hand.  
It was his glasses, and he gratefully slipped them back onto his head with shaking hands before he could convince himself he didn’t want to see whatever was in front of him.  
The reality of it was…pretty cool actually. Dib had seen lots and lots of hypothetical designs for extraterrestrial races in his time, some more out-there than others, but none as intriguing as what was in front of him now. It stood on two short legs, sporting a body shape somewhat like a koala or a small dog, complete with four arms (four!), large ears and antennae, and armored back spikes. It was covered in thick blue fur with darker markings, and its large almond shaped eyes were solid black. Right now they were narrowed suspiciously at Dib as he scanned the alien up and down. Oh.  
“Uh…” Began Dib.  
“Where…Lilo?” Ground out the alien. It seemed to say the words with some effort, accented as though English were not its first language.  
“I, uh, don’t know who that is.” Said Dib honestly. “I just kinda woke up here, curtesy of the wierdos with guns and sedatives who are running around trying to capture you. I have no idea what’s going on, honest.” There was more desperation and less diplomatic convincing in his voice then he would have liked, but fascinating as this thing was he didn’t real feel like getting eaten by it.  
The alien squinted again, seeming to measuring him up with its fathomless eyes. Its back spikes fanned and fell, kind of like Zim’s antennae did when he was deep in thought. Only cooler.  
Finally it turned away from him, seemingly satisfied that he was telling the truth (maybe it could read minds?!), and began muttering low in an alien language that didn’t sound like Irken.  
“Uh…so, what are you? Like, what species are you? What is Lilo? Do you know why we’re here? What are those antennae for if you have ears?”  
“Shh.” Hissed the alien. It stood rigid, ears twitching and Dib assumed it was listening hard. Dib listened hard too. All he heard was his own breathing, the very soft subtle sound of his jacket scraping against the wall as he breathed. Below that, there was a sort of mechanical noise, but it was vague and far-off, like the sound of a refrigerator running. Dib could hear nothing else. But apparently his hearing was not as good as the alien’s. It inclined its head slightly to the left, ears oscillating slightly like radars, before turning back to Dib with some urgency.  
“Not working with them?” It indicated down the hallway with a claw. Dib was momentarily distracted by how cool it was that this creature could communicate in his language without the use of Zim’s universal translator. This was what first contact should be like. Not annoying, which was what talking to Zim was.  
Speaking of which, the creature looked kind of annoyed waiting on his response.  
“Uh, no. Like I said, they sedated me or something and I woke up here. Actually I think they weren’t even after me. They were after this other alien. His name’s Zim and he’s a jerk. Have you ever heard of the Irkens?”  
“Naga.” Said the alien. His back was turned and he looked distracted. Dib assumed that the word meant “no”, or maybe “yes but we don’t have time to discuss them in depth right now” or maybe “they taste delicious.”  
Finally after a second or two more of listening he approached Dib and vocalized lowly.  
“First find Lilo, then Zim. And then escape, okitaka?”  
He was very close to Dib now and there was a faint smell about him that Dib recognized. It was like…seawater, maybe? In a normal circumstance he would be inclined to argue the fact that they were putting rescuing Zim before their immediate safety, or even on the list. But right now the pupil-less oculars of the alien were glittering intently at him and he didn’t really feel like arguing.  
“Yeah, OK. You seem to know what you’re doing.”  
His companion nodded sincerely. He indicated himself with a hand.  
“Stitch.” He intoned.  
“That’s a weird name.” Blurted Dib, before considering that the creature in front of him was from completely different culture, and he had no idea how offended he would be by that and that Dib still didn’t want to get eaten.  
“I, uh, it’s cool though. I’m Dib.” He swallowed, and adjusted his glasses, and Stitch sort of cocked his head at him in acknowledgment like a dog. For a being with no pupils he was pretty expressive, and right now he looked kind of amused. Better than bloodlust, anyway.  
“Well, uh, Stitch- what’s the plan?”  
Dib wasn’t used to asking other people this question. It was kind of uncomfortable and he was prepared to get something stupid in response.  
“We find out where Lilo is.” Said Stitch. He was listening again, so each word came out kind of measured.  
“OK. And how do we do that?”  
“Ask someone.” Said Stitch. He was staring past Dib, into the dark of the hallway, where, very vaguely, Dib could hear the sound of footsteps approaching. And when he turned and smiled back at him Dib saw more teeth than he’d ever wanted to see in his life. 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

“We need a plan.” Whispered Lilo. Her whisper went unheeded.  
“We don’t have time! They’ve come to dissect me...” The little alien’s voice was rising and falling in pitch and it was kind of hard to hear him through the thick barrier without the helpful little window. Lilo ran her hands over the glass one more time, frantically searching for an opening, finding nothing.  
“Look, I need you to not panic, OK?” Lilo waved at him, trying to get his attention.  
“Zim fears nothing.” Said Zim, but his iridescent eyes were wide as saucers and his antennae were flattened back against his head like a threatened animal. Lilo noted that he still had one hand on the wall for support, as if he couldn’t quite stand on his own yet. Not good.  
“Uh, here’s what we’re gonna do…” She ran brown eyes around the small space for a second, chewing her lip, desperately trying to think of something Stitch would come up with that didn’t involve breaking walls or scaling ninety degree angles. “I’ll hide, and you pretend I’m not here. And when he comes to open the cell, we’ll both rush him; you from the front and me from the back. After all, there’s two of us and only one of him.”  
She smiled, this time what she hoped was an encouraging smile. The alien – Zim- did not smile back. He looked at her with narrowed eyes.  
“You’ll leave.”  
“What?”  
“You just want to make sure you won’t be seen, but you’ll run as soon as his attention is on me.”  
“No! I won’t, I…” Lilo breathed in, lowering her voice to a barely perceivable level as the bootsteps grew noticeably louder.  
“Look, right now I’m on this side of the glass and you’re on the other. Now I’m trying to help you but we don’t have time to argue over why you should trust me, so this is gonna have to work this way or we’ll both be caught, OK?”  
The alien opened his mouth to argue. Lilo didn’t give him the chance. The guard was right outside and she could hear him, so in the last minute she ducked behind the only solid thing in sight, which was the opened door.  
The man who entered was the same one that Lilo had seen earlier in the hallway. He was a big man, she noted with disappointment and a growing lump of fear in her throat. He was wearing a sort of tan jumpsuit, with a utility belt consisting of his walkie, a flashlight, some keys and a gun in a holster.  
A gun. Lilo felt cold sweat on the back of her neck and not for the first time wished she was back on the beach with Stitch, toes in the sand, sandals swinging in the waning tropical sunset.  
Zim had backed himself against the furthest wall, and wasn’t doing a very good job of looking like he wasn’t getting ready to attack the man.  
The guard had paused in the door, the hand that held it dangerously close to Lilo’s left shoulder.  
“Oh, you’re awake.” He noted noncommittally, talking like one would talk to himself.  
“What- what am I doing here?!” Began Zim, his voice squeaking dangerously on the first word. “I demand an explanation!”  
The man ignored him. He was rummaging around the little table filled with vials on the other side of the door. Lilo did not like this. She had assumed he would go straight for the cell, and divine the opening to them, and then when his focus was entirely on Zim she could…well…actually now the whole plan sounded like a bad one. Like something she would have proposed only to have Stitch immediately shoot it down in favor of a much better one. Only Stitch wasn’t here, her palms were sticky with sweat where a minute ago she had been freezing and surely the man could hear her heart pounding?  
He had stopped rummaging now, and was examining something in a syringe. A syringe, Lilo mentally kicked herself in the hula skirt for not thinking of it sooner.  
Whatever was in the syringe was light pink, and looked thick, like blood or sugar water. He dripped a little on his index finger, examined it, then wiped the excess on the front of his uniform and began to move towards Zim.  
“Stay against the wall.” He commanded. His voice was still very casual, but not quite pleasant. It reminded Lilo of how Gantu had spoken to her and Stitch on their first meeting, like one might talk to something that ranked in importance just below a child, just above an animal.  
“And keep your hands where I can see them.” He was at the glass now, Lilo leaned just barely to watch him open the cell, hyper aware of her skirt swishing around her ankles.  
The man seemed to run his hand over a section of glass near chest level, and then just step through. There was no conceivable change and Lilo couldn’t tell if it was still open or if it had closed behind him.  
“I’m going to inject you with another dose of tranquilizer now.” The guard intoned coolly. “It won’t put you out or have the side effects like the last one did, though. We’ve managed to tailor this one to better match your biological system. But you’ll want to be a little out of it, we have some X-rays and other tests to run.”  
He was moving towards Zim as he spoke, and Lilo could see that the little alien was full on flipping out now, antennae’s pressed flat against his skull, and even though the guard probably couldn’t tell because of the lack of pupils, his eyes were darting around the room wildly.  
When they landed on Lilo, she gave him a thumbs up, and against her every instinct began to move from behind the door to the table that faced the door of the cell.  
“OK, reach your left arm out and roll up your sleeve.” Commanded the guard.  
“I- N-no! I will not!” Zim seemed to have found his voice, but it was trembling and cracking erratically. “I am a member of the mighty Irken Empire, invader class, one of the elite! Why would I obey you stinking lab human!?”  
Lilo wasn’t looking at them, but she thought she could hear him scuttling to the other side of the cell as he spoke. She used his moment of distraction try and find the right vial, the one that had been in her room, that had put her out the first time.  
It wasn’t here. There was the clear stuff, and then whatever the pink stuff was. There was a large bottle of it and then several more of the small disposable syringes.  
“You might not want to be difficult with me.” She heard the guard say. He had an edge to his voice now, underneath the casual. Lilo was out of time. She grabbed the syringe closest to her and rushed him.  
There was a split second of terror where she thought the lab-coated man was going to notice her before Zim did, but the second he whirled, hand holding the syringe threateningly, two things happened. Lilo dropped to the ground, in order to gain a better vantage point, and Zim suddenly gained a terrifying amount of height on both her and the man; in the form of four spider-like metal limbs that suddenly appeared from his backpack. Lilo had gone skittering backwards out of harm’s way, and now with her back against the corner she managed to snatch the vial out of the hand of the lab coat worker who was now completely occupied by staring up in terror at Zim.  
“Ha!” Sang Zim, and then he proceeded to launch into a rehearsed erratic laugh that echoed around the tiny room. “You’re cornered, pathetic vial beast! Now, tell me where my ship is!”  
“And where Stitch is!” Added Lilo, holding the syringes up for threatening emphasis when the man turned to regard her.  
“And why you brought me here!”  
“Us here.” Corrected Lilo.  
“I can’t tell you anything.” Said the man. His voice was calm. It made Lilo uncomfortable just how calm his voice was. “I’m just a scientist, I operate on the specimens they bring in to me and that’s it.”  
“Zim is no specimen!” Announced Zim, pompously, and then added; “And what kind of operations do you do?”  
The man shrugged. “Whatever they tell me. In your case they were going to test your resistance to water, and certain foods.”  
Lilo didn’t miss the grimace that passed over Zim’s face.  
“Horrible! You will pay for your insult to the mighty Irken race whenever I get out of here with…with…” The alien looked thoughtful, then distracted, then thoughtful again. “lots of…mice! And fire!” He slammed the frontmost metal leg down near the man’s leg for emphasis, which was sort of counter-productive as it made Lilo gasp sharply, which made Zim draw backwards. The man looked unphased.  
“Now tell us the quickest way out of here, and give us any weapons you have.” Ordered Lilo. She figured it was her to turn to do some ordering. Zim looked slightly miffed by this turn of events.  
The man shrugged. He un holstered his gun and slid it across the floor to Lilo, then unloaded his pockets of a small can of what Lilo could only assume was pepper spray, a very small pocket knife that looked rusted shut, and an empty syringe.  
“And your walkie, give us that too.” Demanded Lilo.  
“Don’t have one.” The man regarded her with side eyes.  
“You’re lying,” Stated Lilo, “I saw you on it in the corridor.”  
Zim’s eyes narrowed at this new information, and he shuffled closer, so that the front two legs were dangerously close to the man’s hands where they rested on the floor. The lab coated worker looked thoughtful, before reaching into his boot and unstrapping something from the inside. He handed it up to Zim.  
“So, what do you plan to do with me?” He asked, looking from alien to girl and back. “I mean, sure I know a way out, but I’d have to show you. And I’m not doing that.”  
“You’ll do whatever I tell you meat beast!” Shouted Zim, seemingly glad of the challenge. “Now, on your feet!”  
“Wait.” Said Lilo. She backed up, rounding the man so that she was at what she felt was a safe distance.  
“I don’t think he should come.” She nodded towards the lab coated man and watched as he visibly stiffened. “He…I think he’s trying to make you bring him along. It might be a trap.”  
Zim’s eyes were shiny and hard to read, but his face was telling as he considered.  
“And why do you need her exactly?” The man nodded backwards towards Lilo. “What good is she to you? Do you make it a habit of trusting humans?”  
“See!” Said Lilo, but she had to force the confidence into her voice. “He’s trying to get you to go alone! He’s planning something, trust me!”  
“How do you know she’s not working with us?” Asked the man.  
“He was gonna stick a needle in your arm!”  
“Silence!” Zim’s shout echoed down the corridor and Lilo suddenly felt afraid, (shouldn’t backup have come for him by now?) but everything went silent.  
“Hand Zim the pink vial.” Zim said to Lilo, voice unsettlingly normal for the record he had set in the short time she’d known him.  
She swallowed hard, considered refusing, and then with a deep breath, reached up and handed him the needle. She and the man’s eyes were similarly glued to him as he turned it over, scrutinizing the liquid inside.  
“Stretch out your arm and roll up your sleeve.” He said finally, and for a horrible second Lilo thought he was talking to her until she realized she was still in her sleeveless hula top.  
The man reached for his sleeve, still calm. Then he ran, pushing Lilo to the floor in his rush.  
He only got as far as the door. Zim was faster, he rounded him up with three legs, and with the fourth knocked him to the floor with a sickening crunch of metal against jaw.  
He went down hard, at Lilo’s feet, holding his bruised mouth. Lilo didn’t have time to react before Zim’s legs disappeared, and he was on her level again, the vial stuck into the man’s arm just above the elbow without a second thought.  
He let out a sharp cry, clutching at the spot, before flicking angry eyes back up at Zim.  
“You are really gonna regret this.” He gritted through clenched teeth. There was a sizable red mark on his chin, and his eyes were drooping.  
“Zim regrets nothing!” Shouted Zim, but he moved back a pace anyway, so that he was parallel to Lilo. The man didn’t retort, he slumped forward on his knees and seemed to be focusing on keeping his eyes opened. It didn’t work, and after a second of silence from the alien and human, he fell forward completely, unconscious.  
After about a minute Zim and Lilo apparently hatched the same idea, and went to poke him simultaneously.  
“Oh thank goodness, he’s alive.” Sighed Lilo, finding a weak pulse.  
“Neat.” Said Zim, but he didn’t seem to be referencing her discovery, rather just the fact that the man had fell unconscious by his hand.  
“Hmm,” Intoned Zim before she could remark on this. He was stroking his chin and staring at the vial. “I am amazing.” He concluded, awestruck, and then stuck the thing into a pouch somewhere on the side of his uniform.  
“I uh…I hate to break this to your amazingness.” Said Lilo, swallowing down a thickness as she stared past him into the dark of the hallway. “But we probably should have gotten him to tell us the way out of here before we knocked him cold.”


	4. Insouciance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Running through hallways and not knowing where you're going never gets old. Until it does. The group gets some well-needed sunlight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so terrible. Pop quiz: how many times can I say sorry for taking this long to update? Correct! The answer is not enough. But I said I would finish this thing and I will. It's drafted, but I'm a working, college-attending, procrastinating fool. I hope there's still people who want to read this, and I also hope my rustiness doesn't show too much in this chapter. As always, reviews are the apple of my eye, the bee in my bonnet, the pumpkin spice to my latte.

 

 

Why'd you cut holes in the face of the moon base?

Don't you know about the temperature change

In the cold black shadow?

Are you mad at your walls

Or hoping that an unknown force can repair things for you?

Pardon all the time that you've thrown into your pale grey garden?

If the ship will never come you've got to move along

                                                -Of Moons, Birds & Monsters - MGMT

 

Look, we're gonna go over this one more time." Said Dib. He spoke calmly and with authority, but with an edge of impatience to his voice. Overall not a bad impression of his dad. "You tell us where the other prisoners are, then the quickest way out of here, or my friend here eats you."

Here, Stitch lunged forward like a monster from the darkness, white teeth bared and eyes flashing black death

The man Stitch had caught cowered up against the wall, a crumpled mess of jumpsuit and red rimmed sleepless eyes.

"I don't know!" He squeaked, pressing himself against the hard metal. "I just...it was just a job. They brought us all up here in a windowless van. I don't know where we are even."

"I didn't ask where we are." Said Dib evenly. "I asked where the other prisoners are. You know, Lilo and Zim? And if I were you, I'd hurry up and answer, because Stitch here is getting impatient."

On cue, Stitch made a sort of hissing, growling noise, his claws glinting in hungry anticipation. He looked very convincingly like he was about to eat the man. Actually, Dib considered with post concern, he might really be planning to eat the guy if he didn't tell. Huh.

"H-how are you doing that?" Breathed the man, breaking Dib's chain of thought.

"Doing what?"

"Controlling him...he's...that monster. What did you do to him?"

Dib shrugged, hoping that Stitch wouldn't be offended by either the insult or the implication that he was in charge.  

"None of your business, so don't try to distract us. I'm gonna ask you one more time. Where. Are. The others?"

The man clenched his eyes shut. Stitch growled. It sounded theatrical, but he was half grinning in apparent amusement. "I....I know...the girl was in a holding cell down that way." Said the man finally. He indicated down the leftmost hallway with a shaking finger. "But...I don't know where the Irken is. They didn't give me clearance. Besides, he was...he reacted badly to the sedatives they gave him."

"How so?" Asked Dib. He already wasn't thrilled about rescuing Zim at all, but the idea of hauling a drugged up, possibly vomiting Zim through this place was even less appealing.

"I don’t know what his symptoms were." The man admitted. "I just ran his bloodwork."

"Lilo." Stitch blinked glassy black eyes at him earnestly, his head inclined towards the left hallway. "Lilo first, okitaka?"

"Yeah. Yeah, you're right." Nodded Dib.

"If you mean the girl," said the man, settling back tiredly against the wall. "They might have taken her already."

Stitch really did growl this time, no theatrics involved.

"Home!" Squealed the man. "They were gonna take her back to wherever they got her from. They said so. It was a mistake...you know? They didn't expect her to get shot with the darts. You either.” He said this last bit indicating Dib, almost absent-mindedly.

“Yeah, well. In that case you guys just kind of suck.” Said Dib. He felt his stomach growl again, long and low, and suddenly his limbs felt heavy and weak. “Well, you’ve been a lot of help, but now we’re gonna have to lock you in one of those holding cells, OK?

_That shouldn’t be a question and you’re terrible at this, Dib._

The man seemed almost, grateful, however, to be stripped of his walkie and pocket knife, and hastened into one of the clear cells of thick glass or plastic or whatever it was. At least he wasn’t being eaten. Stitch snarled at him a few more times for good measure, and then they took off down the leftmost way. Stitch ran ahead, disappearing into the darkness in the upper portion of the tunnel, but close enough that Dib could hear the barely perceivable skitter of his claws on the concrete. He took his mind off of his hunger by imaging how life would have been if Stitch had crash landed in his neighborhood instead of Zim.

How cool it would have been to present _him_ to his father and classmates.

_Blue fur, four arms, spikes, antennae…there, deny **that**. _

Which lead to the much more unsettling thought of what it would be like to be on the same terms with Stitch as he was with Zim.

Dib very quickly came to the conclusion that he’d be dead, and that maybe things weren’t so bad the way they were.

 

 

Lilo felt like she’d been walking for days.

After they’d left the unconscious scientist stuffed into the cell, her and Zim had set off down the path opposite the one he had came, after some initial argument.

Zim wanted to go further in, arguing that it would be easier to find the leader of the whole operation and demand release. Lilo countered eloquently that he was completely crazy, and then managed to argue with him long enough that he didn’t realize they were heading down the path she had recommended while he ranted.

The fear and disorientation had worn off by now, and in its place Lilo found that Zim was…crabby, mostly. And loud. He acted a little like Jumba when Nani put her foot down against something he _really_ wanted to do.

He’d been ranting for at least an hour, she thought now, rounding another bend. And despite her repeated attempts at quieting him, his voice reverberating from the concrete walls in its staccato fury. He also seemed to have completely forgotten, at this point, who he was ranting too, and kept mentioning people and events that she had no clue about.

“Who’s Dib?” She asked, for what had to be the twentieth time.

“Dib! Don’t even get me started on that…ugh!” Zim stomped his foot angrily, glowering into the darkness as he forged ahead with the hawaiiain girl close behind. “Do you have any idea, _any idea_ how many times I will destroy him for getting Zim into this mess!?”

“How many?” Lilo asked patiently.

The Irken made a few vague grunting noises of frustration while waving his fists aimlessly around in front of him, apparently unable to come up with a number sufficiently grand enough, before settling on; “ _So many_!”

“So is Dib an Irken? Is he like, your co-pilot or something?” She asked after a while more of angry, unintelligible grumbling.

“Is he…? Ha!” Scoffed Zim as soon as he had run out of breath long enough to register her question. “The Dib is no Irken. Merely an annoying human dirt-smeet like yourself.”

“Smeet?” Asked Lilo out of habit, and received, as she expected, no reply. “So he’s human? Cool. Do you think he got kidnapped too?”

Zim made a “I dunno” noise, shrugging. “If he did, I can only _hope_ the rest of the filthy science humans are too busy dissecting his _giant head_ to notice our…my…brilliant escape.”

“You…you’re kind of a jerk, know that?”

Zim had whirled, mouth already opened to retort, when suddenly a siren screamed out of the ceiling above them.

Reflexively, Lilo had dropped to her knees and covered her ears. Zim stayed rooted in one spot, head snapping around looking for the source of the noise, antennae pulled taut against his head.

“Down there!” Yelled Lilo over the noise. She indicated the doorway at the end of the hall. It was larger and more ominous then the previous one, and Lilo hoped

_Please please please_

with all her heart it was a way out of this place.

Zim didn’t have to be told twice. He bolted and Lilo thought, _he’ll leave without me if I don’t stay beside him._ Together they stumbled into someplace dark and huge, where they air was clearer somehow. She ran smack into Zim’s stopped form, her stomach making hard contact with the weird lump of metal attached to his back.

She started to say something to the effect of “watch it!”, but stopped herself.

He was holding an arm out rigid to stop her, and his antennae were straight up. She’d seen Stitch do the same thing with his ears, and didn’t have to be an alien biologist to know that he was sensing something.

A second of still, rigid listening passed, and then the small alien scuttled behind a nearby storage bin, Lilo close behind. They hunched down there, and for minute nothing happened and Lilo almost thought it had been a false alarm, and then the wall began to open.

Not a wall- it was a hatch. A huge metal hatch, the entrance to a hanger. It disconnected in the middle in jagged ridges and suddenly there it was – sunlight. Freedom. Lilo could have cried she’d missed it so bad.

The overhead siren was still blaring, but now it was being drowned out by the steadily growing roar of...a helicopter, Lilo realized, seconds before it loomed into view, a dark blot on the impossibly bright background.

Zim let out a yelp when Lilo's hair smacked him in the face, both of them knocked back by the rush of wind that accompanied the deafening sound. It harbored softly, waved in by two men in plain gray uniforms that seemed to materialize from the other end of the room. The landing gear touched down, and the whir of the propellers slowly faded. A hatch was opened, and two men hopped out, wearing identical grey suits. There's was some mulling around, some snapping of cables while Lilo watched and felt her legs cramp up and go to sleep. A flat cart was wheeled from somewhere in the abyss of the warehouse, and the men began leveraging a large rounded object out onto it.

Zim let out a hiss of recognition as soon as the curved metal was in sight, squeezing pointed fingers into Lilo's arm.

"That's my ship!" He rasped with indignant disbelief. "Oh those…how _dare_ they?!"

His voice kept rising in pitch and for a minute, Lilo was scared he might actually try and attack them.

"Calm down," She whispered in her most soothing voice, one she normally reserved for Stitch. "Let's just see where they take it. Then we can follow and maybe...I don't know, steal it back or something."

"Silence!" He screeched, voice barely beneath the level of audible. "You understand nothing dirt child! An Irken Invader's Voot cruiser is his greatest resource! His pride and...and.."

"OK, Ok. I get it." Hissed Lilo. "So what are you gonna do then?"

A contemplative silence. The group carrying the Irken ship were disappearing into a hallway on the other side. "I know!" Said Zim suddenly. "We'll watch them from a safe distance, and then as soon as they let down their guard, I'll steal back my ship!"

He then chuckled darkly at “his” idea. In spite of the cold, and her hunger, and her fear, and her growing dread, what began as an eyeroll on Lilo's part ended in her breaking into nervous laughter at her companion’s ridiculousness. He apparently interpreted this as a form of praise for his brilliant plan, and the two of them stood in darkness for a couple minutes, laughing until tears sprung into their eyes.

 

 

 

 

Dib wanted to go home. He didn't care how, at this point. It was cold, really really cold here, and he was really, really hungry and every hallway looked the same. The architecture of this place was just frustrating. Everything looked like it _should_ be familiar, but it wasn't. And things didn't make sense. The only thing that made sense about entire situation, in fact, was that it was Zim's fault. He didn’t know how, or why, or even if the little Irken was aware of getting them into this mess. He just knew, somehow. Like a sixth sense.

    Still, as much as Dib wanted to go home at any cost, the longer he spent with Stitch the more fascinated he was by the extraterrestrial. Not only was he just...cool, in every way that the young wide-eyed Dib Membrane had imagined aliens could be, but he baffled the boy with what seemed to be a genuine worry for this girl called "Lilo". 

"Hey, so, this Lilo," He began tentatively.  Stitch was scuttling along in front of him, using his ears and nose in turn like some sort of freakish hound dog. “What do you need her for? I mean, what is she to you?"

"Ohana." Said Stitch, standing up on two legs and gazing into the darkness. The word was meaningless to Dib, but he shrugged it off. The little blue alien had made it pretty clear with his one-word answers that he wasn't much for conversation.

"Do you have night vision?" Tried Dib.

Stitch made an affirmative sound, turning around with eyes that were shrouded in a film of iridescent green.

"Woah." Said Dib. "That’s..." He paused. They both did. Ahead of them was a large door. It was unlike the other doors, seemingly cut and pasted in a doorframe where it didn't belong, one that was too small to fit its hulking metal frame. The humming that he had heard earlier seemed infinitesimally louder here. Dib didn't have to try it to know that it was locked tight.

"I wonder what's..."

Stitch threw himself at it, shoulder against the dull metal intending to break it from the frame. It took Dib a second to register what happened next. There was a dull snap of electricity, and Stitch flew backwards with a yelp, landing in a pile of smoking fur against the wall by Dib's foot.

"Geez! What the? Are you ok?!"

In place of a response Stitch growled at the metal door, rearing backwards before charging again. This time he shoved both clawed hands beneath the frame. Dib heard the snap, heard the dull hum of electricity grow steadily louder. He smelt burning fur and heard himself yelling for Stitch to _stop put it down for the sake of all that's good before you **die**_ but probably actually just screaming incoherently. It was over in a second. Stitch let out some kind of angry spiel of alien words, and there was a resounding crack as the door and it's frame were bodily wrenched outwards, taking a significant portion of the wall with it, and thrown onto the hallway next to an amazed Dib's feet. In the clearing smoke Dib sat there for a second with his jaw flapping uselessly.

"HOLY BIGFOOT". He said after a while. Stitch was breathing heavily. He ran a clawed hand over the fur on his head, and took an unsteady step forward into the smoke filled room.

It was empty. Well, not empty, but devoid of either little girl or annoying alien invaders, and any other form of sentient life. A control panel blinked idly with flashing red lights, and a wall of surveillance screens lit up the cloudy space.

Dib’s eyes darted between them. Only about a third were online, showing mostly empty dark corridors or quiet rooms full of white lights.

“Look” Said Stitch. A light was flashing on the control panel that said ‘docking bay 12’. Dib pressed the button that was next to it and a screen to their left fizzled into life, the blurry picture slowly clearing to reveal some kind of large warehouse.

“"Lilo!" Yelped Stitch. Long before Dib's eyes were accustomed enough to the gloom to spot anything. But the little alien's ears had perked, and his eyes were shining gleefully at what Dib could now make out to be a girl. Roughly his height, tanned skin. Long dark hair, in...hula clothes? All of sudden Dib felt bad for complaining about the cold.

The girl crept out into the empty darkness from behind a crate, and then suddenly Zim was there, right behind her.

"No way." Uttered Dib in disbelief. They appeared to be conversing. Stitch yanked on his arm, pointing a claw at the Irken's figure in apparent worry.

"Zim?"

"Yeah, that's him." Said Dib. "So I guess that kills two birds with one stone. Man, your friend Lilo must have the patience of a saint to be working with him."

"Ih." Nodded Stitch in agreement. His clawed fingers began running eagerly over the control panel, flipping switches and pulling up panels. Dib really wasn’t sure if he was trying to work it or dismantle it until another screen buzzed to life, and a grid showed up, peppered with nonsensical looking lines and red triangles.

"A map?" Guessed Dib. Stitch nodded. He indicated a red dot on the map, blinking in steady time. "Lilo." He stated. His clawed finger moved to another flashing dot, a couple winding hallways to the right. "Us."  Dib wanted to ask how he knew that. Also, how he knew how to work the panel well enough to pull up a map, or _wrench an electrified steel door weighing three tons straight out of the wall_. But, that would be wasting time. So instead he said, "Well let's go then." And then stopped, fascinated. On the wall across from him, half visible through the shadows was Stitch.

Well, a picture of him. He fumbled around for the cord of the only light source in the room, a thin floor lamp, which illuminated the line of large illustrations tacked up on what looked like a decaying corkboard. They were all of Stitch; medical diagrams, skeletal, muscle, and vein x rays, detailed and marked up and down with medical notes.

"Woah," said Dib. It felt like the ten millionth time he'd said that since waking up. "What do you think they want these for?"

Stitch shrugged, creeping closer to examine them with squinted eyes. He walked slowly, on two legs, Dib realized, when he wasn't in a hurry.

"Lilo first." He said after a second of consideration. Dib was caught up in reading the notes scribbled into the margin in barely illegible doctor's hand.

"Are you really bulletproof?" He asked in excited distraction. Stitch tugged on his coat sleeve impatiently.

"Yeah, bulletproof, ok? Now lilo."

"Right, right." He was starting to behave like his Dad, Dib realized in distaste.  

 

They rushed down the hallway together. Stitch was no longer going slow enough to smell out the path ahead. Apparently one look at the computerized map had been enough to memorize the route they needed to take. As a result, Dib was panting and gasping after him in a pathetic attempt to keep up. They burst through a door and found themselves in what Dib could only assume to be the hanger they had seen on the surveillance camera.

The room was even darker in person, and Dib's stumbling run turned into halting, heavy footsteps. Stitch had stopped too, somewhat ahead of him. If it hadn't been for the bright green of his iridescent night vision lenses, Dib would have thought he was completely alone. And that did not seem like a good thing to be.

Stitch seemed to have decided on a direction, and Dib had been going to ask where next, a stupid question for sure, but something to break the silence, when a lot of things happened at once. There was a loud whooshing air noise, then a grinding metallic sound like some huge piece of machinery scraping against another, and then abruptly there were lights everywhere and an ear-splitting siren overhead. Dib dropped to his knees in panic, shielding his eyes from the harsh light and found himself facing the far doorway. Men were pouring out of it, lots and lots of them, in the black and gray jumpsuits and starch white lab coats. Men with guns, he thought grimly, with an almost distant panic in the pit of his stomach.

This thought took place in about the space of a second. The next two things happened even faster. The grinding metallic noise sounded again, but louder, and suddenly it came into sight. The "it" was Zim's little spaceship. It burst through the far wall in an explosion of smoke and powdery chunks of concrete. He had a brief image of the little Irken's wild eyed, maniac grin and of another, more human face next to his, before they had cleared the room, knocking over the crowd of pursuers and spectators, before inelegantly bursting through the far wall in a flash of blinding light.

For the second time that day, Dib felt himself being wrenched upright by a clawed hand. It dragged him behind the nearest shelter, which just so happened to be the backside of a hulking black helicopter.

"Lilo" Said Stitch urgently, pointing out the gaping hole where the Voot had just vanished.

"Yeah, I saw. Zim too." Said Dib. _Also did I mention Zim has lots of idiotic plans? ‘Cause I'd say that was probably one of them_ "What now?"

"We follow them." answered stitch, like that was a really dumb question (it probably was), and indicated the sleek black side of the chopper with a clawed hand.

The siren was still blaring, and now men were yelling orders, all combined with the deafening whapping sounds of helicopters starting up. Dib realized that in a minute they would probably be at this chopper too. The guys with guns.

"Can you even fly this?" Dib asked, momentarily talking to a different alien in his head.

"Sure. Stitch can fly anything." Grinned not-Zim, showing a lot of teeth, and before Dib had time to consider his options (there weren't many) he was, yet again, hoisted up by his jacket the way a kitten gets carried by the scruff of its neck, and set in the passenger seat.

By this time, the room was in a state of utter panic. Stitch didn't even bother trying to reach the panel from the pilot’s chair. He was a blur; cutting and tying wires, flipping switches, pulling levers. The helicopter came to life in the space of a minute, and in the chaos it was hovering well off the ground before anyone bothered to notice that instead of two gray suited adults there was a fuzzy blue alien and a somewhat sick-looking twelve year old behind the panel.

Bullets pinged off the sides of the copter, their dull impact sounding like hail on a tin roof. Dib squeezed his eyes shut and tried to reason with himself.

_Zim tried to steal your organs once. And succeeded. You can handle this._

Stitch was cackling though, and shouting gleefully down at them in his guttural, alien language. And while it wasn't exactly a comforting noise, it at least meant that things were probably going well. Maybe.

His stomach felt like it dropped below sea level when finally, with a defiant shudder from the copter, they gained enough altitude to soar out over the heads of the growing crowd, and out the Voot-sized hole into free air.

Air. Dib was dying for some. His pulse was racing and he felt hot and sweaty and clammy at the same time. There was noise all around them. Some door was still opened, letting in the growling sound of the propeller. Un-secured cables smacked angrily into the landing gear. Stitch, however, was quiet now, focused on the task ahead of them.

After a second Dib was able to look back. The huge hatch door was properly open now, looking like a hungry metal mouth with flat blunt teeth. From out of this huge black flies- the rest of the helicopters- zipped out in hot pursuit.

"Ikata!" Yapped Stitch. Dib whirled and saw the tiny sparkle of Zim's retreating Voot, a purple speck on the horizon. A horizon which appeared to Dib’s sun-blind eyes as a blanket of endless forest.

They gained quickly on the little craft. Which meant that either Zim was too stupid or too cocky to think they would be followed, or his ship was woefully unfit for high-speed air travel. The former was definitely more likely.

"How are they gonna know it's us?!" Dib yelled over the roar of the wind. "We look like every other helicopter!"

Stitch seemed to consider this for a minute. He flipped a couple switches on the control panel, and the copter dipped, then steadied itself, the red “autopilot” light flickering on.

Then he looked Dib in the eye as if to say, “hang tight, don’t touch anything”, and promptly crawled out of the copter. Dib would have been amazed or terrified or something similar, but he’d kind of reached his quota of that for the day, so instead he settled back into his seat and proceeded in cleaning the lenses of his smudged glasses.

Stitch, meanwhile, skirted around the propeller blade’s range on six paws before perching on the snub nose of the vessel. They were coming up on the smaller ship now, and if the course he had set was correct…

Dib slipped his glasses back on and looked out the side window to find a startled looking Zim staring back at him, three-fingered hands still clutched around the controls of his own vessel. His surprise and fear turned to relieved annoyance when he caught sight of Dib. The girl – Lilo- on the other hand, was waving her arm off. At Stitch, he figured, hopping up and down on the front of the helicopter to get their attention. But she caught his eye and he gave her a tiny, apathetic wave accompanied by a small nauseous smile as if to say, “some weather we’re having huh? Nice day to escape a possible malicious government agency with some aliens, isn’t it?” 

She returned the smile, with eyebrows raised, as if to say, “A little chilly for helicopters, don’t you think? Next time let’s fly first class.”

Then directly in the middle of this entirely imagined conversation Dib was having with her in purely facial expressions, her face changed.  

It was sudden, too sudden for Dib to react. Her eyes widened and her pupils shrunk, and then she was looking behind him not at him, and then she opened to mouth to yell and then she was pointing behind him in terror.

Dib turned. He saw something white and gray and cylindrical riding on a tail of fire.

Then the missile hit.


End file.
